Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a set of strategies and programs for managing an organization's interactions with customers, clients, sales prospects, and similar entities. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes such as sales activities, marketing activities, customer service, technical support, and comparable ones. With an overall goal of finding, attracting, and winning new clients, nurturing and retaining existing clients, enticing former clients back, and reducing costs of marketing and client service, CRM describes an organization-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments. Increases in revenue, higher rates of client satisfaction, and savings in operating costs are some of the benefits measurable of CRM to an enterprise.
For efficiency and satisfactory user experience, hosted, multi-tenant CRM systems need to provide their users a rich support for data reporting. Often these reporting solutions may be restrictive in nature when compared to their on-premise, single-tenant CRM system counterparts due to security and other reasons. Defining a rich and powerful framework for data reporting that works seamlessly between on-premise and hosted systems based on standard reporting tools remains a challenge.